The Nvidia Tegra 3 platform and its insane five-core chip have been a long time coming. Now that we’ve seen one tablet and phone that will run Kal-El, it’s safe to assume everyone will start churning out models — just like we saw with the Tegra 2 before. Lenovo has now been confirmed as an early entrant, with its as-yet-unnamed slate spotted by an Engadget tipster.

It’s a slick-looking 10.1-inch tablet wrapped in brushed black anodized aluminum, which makes this IdeaPad or LePad look every bit as snazzy as the Asus Transformer Prime. Details on the Lenovo are sparse at this point, though it’s known to pack 2GB of DDR3 memory in addition to the 1.6GHz Tegra 3 chip and a full-sized USB port. The obligatory front and rear-facing cameras are included (resolutions have yet to be revealed), and there’s also a biometric scanner smack dab where your right index finger will likely land on the back. Like Lenovo’s IdeaPad A1, you won’t find an HDMI port on this new tablet.

Based on the size of the tablet in relation to elements like that USB port, this Lenovo Tegra 3 will be significantly smaller than Lenovo’s previous Android tablets. It’s also going to be the company’s first running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and is thought to be launching before the end of the calendar year.

That could mean that the Asus Transformer Prime won’t be the first ICS slate to go on sale. Rather than launch first with Honeycomb and push an OTA update to ICS once the software was ready, Asus opted to hold off and ship with the update pre-installed. That just might give Lenovo the opportunity to sneak ahead in the race to be first — unless, of course, someone else pops up with another tablet before that happens.